William Monroe Trotter: Black Radical

Channing Gerard Joseph is an award-winning journalist whose career has taken him from the southern tip of Africa to the mountains of rural Japan. His articles have been published by The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, MTV News, and others. He was a fellow of the International Center for Journalists and has received support from the Ford Foundation, the Scripps Howard Foundation, and the Brooks and Joan Fortune Family Foundation. He is a 2019 winner of the Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship. He teaches journalism at the University of Southern California.

Kerri K. Greenidge teaches in Tufts University’s Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora, where she is director of the program in American studies, and where she is also codirector of the African American Trail Project. Her most recent book, Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (Liveright), reestablishes William Monroe Trotter’s essential place next to Douglass, Du Bois, and King in the pantheon of American civil rights heroes. William Monroe Trotter (1872– 1934), though still virtually unknown to the wider public, was an unlikely American hero. With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, he galvanized black working- class citizens to wield their political power despite the violent racism of post-Reconstruction America. For more than thirty years, the Harvard-educated Trotter edited and published the Guardian, a weekly Boston newspaper that was read across the nation. Defining himself against the gradualist politics of Booker T. Washington and the elitism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Trotter advocated for a radical vision of black liberation that prefigured leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. Synthesizing years of archival research, historian Kerri Greenidge renders the drama of turn- of- the- century America and reclaims Trotter as a seminal figure, whose prophetic, yet ultimately tragic, life offers a link between the vision of Frederick Douglass and black radicalism in the modern era.